German Ethnography in Australia

16 Tracks and shadows: Some social effects of the 1938 Frobenius Expedition to the north-west Kimberley1 Anthony Redmond In 1938, Andreas Lommel, newly graduated in anthropology and archaeology from the Frobenius Institute in Frankfurt, along with his colleagues Helmut Petri and Agnes Schulz and an Australian postgraduate student in psychology, Patrick Pentony, spent several months conducting fieldwork in and around Munja Government Station on Walcott Inlet in the north-west Kimberley region of Western Australia. When I arrived in the Kimberley 56 years later, intent on studying jurnba (a Kimberley Aboriginal public song genre), together with its performers and composers, Lommel’s German-language monograph Die Unambal, ein Stamm in Nordwest-Australien (1952) was an important source for approaching this subject. A newly published Oceania article compiled by Alan Rumsey as a collaboration between Lommel and senior Ngarinyin man David Mowaljarlai (Lommel and Mowaljarlai 1994), had already whetted my appetite for exploring the song texts composed by Alan Balbungu, which had been partially transcribed in Lommel’s monograph. 1 This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Frank Zandvoort: adventurer, linguist, farmer and unforgettable friend. 413 GERMAN ETHNOGRAPHY IN AUSTRALIA Alan and Francesca Merlan had also recorded local people singing a number of these texts during their fieldwork in Ngarinyin country in 1993. These teachers and colleagues subsequently introduced me to Mowaljarlai during one of his visits to Sydney to work on their Ngarinyin- language texts, and a plan was put in place for me to begin fieldwork with Ngarinyin people in the following year. Map 16.1 The movement of the song cycle across the Kimberley. Source: CartoGIS, The Australian National University . One of my first points of call in July 1994 was to visit senior Ngarinyin man Laurie Gowanulli to talk about the Balbungu songs. While Mowaljarlai was a boy of just 10 in 1938, Gowanulli was already a young man of 20 or so when he first met Lommel during the Frobenius Institute group’s visit to Munja. Laurie was more than happy, as it turned out, to sit with me and my good friend, Frank Zaandvoort, who had recently completed a translation of Lommel’s German-language monograph for me to work from. Laurie also agreed to sing and record more of the Balbungu song corpus with us and, in between those recordings, he reminisced at length about those pre–World War II times in Munja. 414 16 . TRACKS AND SHADOWS Plate 16.1 Laurie Gowanulli at Mowanjum, July 1994. Source: Anthony Redmond personal collection . By the time we had made our way through recording as many of the remaining Balbungu songs as Gowanulli (Gowan) could recall, I was very much under the spell of that charming gentleman’s songs and stories and determined to follow up the possible implications of the songs themselves, the shamanic process involved in dreaming them and the ways in which they were used and distributed across that social world. Gowanulli’s reflections on Lommel’s 1938 visit to Munja provide some interesting insights into what kind of sense Aboriginal people living in those settlements were making of the presence of these particular Europeans, who were so unusually interested in their sociocultural world, and how he and his countrymen contextualised this interest in them within the rapidly unfolding events that would soon draw the entire region on to a wartime footing. In the first instance, Gowan described how he and his countrymen had generously taken care of Lommel and the other members of the Frobenius Expedition despite an uneasiness about the exact nature of these visitors’ motivations for collecting examples of sacred ceremonial boards and making hand-drawn copies of the wanjina cave paintings to be subsequently shipped back to Europe: 415 GERMAN ETHNOGRAPHY IN AUSTRALIA Mark ’em [draw them] people.2 I can’t see how he drawing all the old people and all that, Wanjina too. They [his countrymen] take ’em out, stockman boy took ’em up there in that cave place and deliver ’em there, one boy look after ’em, right, they all getting all that cave drawing and mark ’em all that exactly like that thing that was in the cave too, in that paper they bin put it. They all took ’em right back there but we never got answer from all that time. We don’t know what they took ’em for. That Germany is a long way from Australia. When I asked Gowan what he and his friends might have received in return for their investments of care, knowledge and time in their German visitors, he was emphatic that there had been little in the way of reciprocity (only lollies and tobacco), but he quickly located this in its particular historical context. In those days, he said, his people typically responded to requests from whitefella strangers much as they would to a request from an Aboriginal person coming from far afield and therefore in need of assistance and support because they were marooned in an unfamiliar social world. That was, he maintained, a very different situation to nowadays when Aboriginal people had become much more wary about requests for cultural, and especially ritual, knowledge and voiced their opinions and expectations much more stridently: Nothing. No, we don’t know what we give them for, we never had that thought, you know, we never thought about it. Not like now, everybody expecting, ‘What for this, what for that, what you want this for?’ All that thing only coming out today. My time, when I bin grow, we only used do work, friend coming from there, long way we give what he ask for, he welcome, we give ’em anything, he can learn, something, well like the Germany mob they come there, we be good to them, give us everything what we needed like lolly and thing, and we give them thing and gone back home. 2 Agnes Schulz was by all accounts a very proficient portraitist and drew a number of portraits of people living at Munja, including Gowanulli’s close friend, the late Paddy Wama. 416 16 . TRACKS AND SHADOWS To emphasise the cooperative and friendly approach his people had taken in those early days with white strangers, and Germans in particular, Gowan compared his countrymen’s open-handed assistance to Lommel’s party with the lifesaving kindness kinsmen from Drysdale River Mission had provided in finding two lost German airmen who had crash-landed their aircraft on the mudflats of the north-west coast in 1932:3 Like that two bloke there, I don’t know about two, when German travel back with the plane and when they crash somewhere in Wyndham, they crash there and Aboriginal people bin grab them, mind ’em—we see ’im in movie they make film all the time—the blackfellow look after them two German, they was still all right, fly ’em to Broome, nothing wrong with the people. But like this now what this one we give ’em [referring to Balbungu’s songs], he welcome, good, old man was all right, old man he was the composer, he was the boss of the corroboree. We been pleased when anybody come up listen, recording, not this sort of one [pointing to my digital tape recorder], different one, long like that [early wax cylinder recording apparatus], like this he put that thing machine through from there and make him sing that he pick up like this cassette and he get a recording in there now. But that was old time, I never see that one now. In these particular discussions, Gowan barely acknowledged the prevailing colonial context in which white managers infamously exerted an intermittent and often unpredictably violent control over the many Ngarinyin, Wunambal and Worrorra people who were by then living part of the year in and around Munja Government Station. In his view, although subjected to an onerous seasonal work regime in Munja’s peanut oil plantations, the most senior Aboriginal men at least continued to exercise a high degree of personal autonomy and mobility. The implication was that the assistance offered to these European strangers was largely on his countrymen’s own initiative and was derived from their traditional ethic of kin-based generosity rather than being coerced by mission managers: 3 Hans Bertram and Adolf Klausmann were flying the Junkers W33 seaplane Atlantis from Cologne, Germany, on a goodwill mission to Australia for the aircraft maker, Junkers, when they ran into a severe storm between Timor and Darwin. Flying during the night of 15 May 1932, they became lost in thick cloud. Eventually, at dawn, running short of fuel, they spotted the coast and landed in a sheltered bay. After a sleep and a think, they decided to use their remaining fuel to fly further down the coast, closer to where they believed the nearest town was located. In fact, they moved further away from civilisation, finally landing near Rocky Island, about 170 kilometres north- west of Wyndham. See: simplyaustralia.net/article-strangers2.html. 417 GERMAN ETHNOGRAPHY IN AUSTRALIA Well, like the German mob, we just come friendly, well we know nothing. He give us what he give us, only give ’em lolly, he might get tobacco, he give ’em, not tea and sugar flour, no, only what he got it, he give them now lolly and that sort of thing, old people there, they give them whole lot and the old people go easy and give them. Reflecting on that possibly naive and open-handed attitude to strangers, Gowanulli believed that, in recent times, his countrymen had developed a more knowing and self-protective diffidence in such dealings as they had become more conscious of the ways in which their cultural resources carried potential value in their negotiations with Europeans: You know if people come to ask to know everything, to understand, if people come they be surprised, what you, maybe you say, ask me, ‘I want that.’ ‘What for?’ ‘Oh for so and so.’ Might be you want me to get that thing.

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